Mar
Petitioning Prayer
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Is there any other kind? Well, yes, but this month of the Year of Prayer, I’ll be taking a look at petitioning prayer. For those of you tuning in, every Sunday throughout 2007 there will be a post on Balanced Life Center exploring prayer and religion. In January we talked about the basics of prayer and did an introduction. During February the focus was on primal religions, also known as tribal traditions. In March, the focus will be petitioning prayer.
I started off last week with a post on prayer in a slightly different form: making a request, then leaving it in the God can. It’s my idea of petitioning prayer. If I feel that something is beyond my realm of belief, I ask for a bit of help. Generally, I think that prayer is a matter of changing my mind and aligning myself with Spirit.
Petitioning prayer, on the other hand, is pray that asks a deity (God) for something. It presumes that God is outside of ourselves. A good example is the Serenity Prayer:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
The courage to change the things I can,
And the wisdom to know the difference.
If you were praying for a job, you might say:
God, steer me in the direction of the perfect job for me.
It’s really a matter of semantics and personal preference. Since God is everywhere, he is equally available outside of you, inside of you, all around you, and as you. The pitfall of petitioning prayer is that it takes the responsibility outside of yourself and places it elsewhere. Sometimes, that’s what we need. It’s why I have the God can. In those instances where I feel that something is completely beyond me, I access God outside of me. At those points I feel like someone outside of myself has to intervene.
Petitioning prayer is a wonderful tool to have in your spiritual tool belt. It helps you to surrender your worries or concerns to a Higher Power, especially in times when you feel like you’re swimming in it.
In Spirit,
Nneka
March 11th, 2007 at 4:57 am
O My Father, I have moments of deep unrest — moments when I know not what to ask by reason of the very excess of my wants. I have in these hours no words for Thee, no conscious prayers for Thee. My cry seems purely worldly; I want only the wings of a dove that I may flee away. Yet all the time Thou has accepted my unrest as a prayer. Thou has interpreted its cry for a dove’s wings as a cry for Thee, Thou has received the nameless longings of my heart as the intercessions of Thy Spirit. They are not yet the intercessions of my spirit; I know not what to ask. But Thou knowest what I ask, O my God. Thou knowest the name of that need which lies beneath my speechless groan. Thou knowest that, because I am made in Thine image, I can find rest only in what gives rest to Thee; therefore Thou hast counted my unrest unto me for righteousness, and has called my groaning Thy Spirit’s prayer. Amen.
- Rev. George Matheson (1842-1906)
March 13th, 2007 at 1:19 pm
[...] One night as I lay on my bed, in actual physical pain from these terrible emotions, I did something in desperation that I had never thought of doing before. I prayed for help. I do not have a concept of a God that is a kind of person who relates to us individually - though I do believe there is an intelligence and an energy that organizes the universe. And prayer for me is usually more like a conversation with all the energies surrounding me - the trees, the lake, the unseen spirits. It’s more to do with trying to understand the world and expressing gratitude and appreciation. I had never actually thought to ask for any kind of healing or comfort. To me, that’s a Christian thing, and I’m not really a Christian. [Note: just after publishing this post I discovered a wonderful post that precisely explains the difference between the two types of prayer I’m talking about. Nneka at Balanced Life Center calls prayer that asks for help as if from an outside agency, “petitioning prayer.” Exactly the type of prayer that was so new for me.] [...]